Product Specifications

Product Line(s)

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series offers two classes of line cards: classic and E-Series. Classic line cards provide 6 gigabits of switching capacity per slot. E-Series line cards increase the per slot switching capacity to 24 gigabits. This increase in per slot switching capacity with the E-Series line cards requires the Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series chassis and the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Supervisor Engine 6-E. Classic line cards may be deployed in both classic and E-Series chassis with either classic Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series supervisor engines or with the Supervisor Engine 6-E. With the Supervisor Engine 6-E, the classic line cards per slot switching capacity remains at 6 gigabits per slot. However, because of the centralized switching architecture of the Cisco Catalyst 4500, the classic line cards will adopt all of the new Supervisor Engine 6-E features such as eight queues per port, dynamic QoS, and hardware-based IPv6 routing. Please refer to the Supervisor Engine 6-E data sheet for more feature details. Classic line cards and E-Series line cards may be mixed and matched within a Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series chassis with no performance degradation: classic line cards will operate at 6 gigabits per slot, and E-Series line cards will operate at 24 gigabits per slot. Table 1 summarizes the chassis and supervisor support for both classic and E-Series line cards.